I Taught an Ahmed: Please Don't Detain Them

I need you to hear this. I have taught students just like the Ahmed in Texas who was detained for building a clock and bringing it to school.

They are from South Asia, or Southwest Asia, or other parts of the world. Their skin was not White. They had names that you may have never heard before (though their names were not really Ahmed - apologies for the click-bait headline). Their first languages are not English.

And my Ahmeds are brilliant. They are on their school robotics teams. They want to be business people, doctors, pharmacist, engineers, and they are everything right with the United States. They demonstrate innovation, creativity, integrity, perseverance, and resourcefulness. Whether their robotics teams are well-resourced or running on shoestrings, they are showing up after or before school hours to work on projects involving math and science. Some of them would come to my office hours or e-mail me between class sessions for extra help.

In a time of a much hand-wringing about students who cannot do math and science, or students who don't care about school, my Ahmeds prove to me that at least to some students are being served by the United States school system and some Millenials have society's interests at heart (see my post In Defense of Millenials for more on that). They prove that our labor force can and will fill the skilled positions that we've had difficulty staffing.

So I am asking: do not detain my Ahmeds. Do not delay them. Do not hold them back from their dreams and their goals. Because my dream, my goal is to see my Ahmeds change the world.